[Living Sensical] Reminders of Mortality - Nightingale

When we’re young, we tend to think of life as never-ending. Time for us stretches off limitlessly into the future. But as we get older, even in our forties – which should be a time of vigor, interest and activity, really a time of young maturity – we begin to get, from time to time, small reminders of our mortality. It might be a sudden shortness of breath, or a perfectly normal twinge in the chest... a bit of back trouble. But we get these occasional reminders that time is not, after all, standing still for us. That we, like the Caesars of old, are indeed mortal.
To the neurotic, this sort of reminder fills him with dread and plunges him into even deeper depression. But to the fairly normal, reasonably well-adjusted person this comes as a reminder to enjoy to the fullest the time that is remaining; that days are not things to be waited through until Saturday, or a birthday, or Christmas... but rather to be savored and enjoyed one by one, hour by hour. We come to an understanding that to kill time, as we so aptly put it, is really nothing more than to kill a little part of ourselves since time is all we have.